Summary
This is my last blog
from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting
held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

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The Seventh Jini Community Meeting (Final)

This is my last blog
from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting
held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

caveat: I should remind everybody that these are
my observations and thoughts and not necessarily of those
of my employer, any other member of the Jini community,
or indeed anyone else on the planet. I'm a member of the
Jini development team so these next few blogs will be
"a little closer to home" than the essays I've done for
Artima previously. Well, consider yourself warned! <grin>

Wrapping Up

Jim Hurley's opening on the last day began with
the notion Finishing Strong and so we did.
During the previous two days, sessions had some
small break between them but not so on the last
day. We crammed all we could in those few hours
before the close.

It also appeared that participants took the
sleep is optional idea seriously. By
the end of the conference people were visibly
fatigued--but happy.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball

Did I mention that this event was really fun?
I got a chance to just sit with Ken Arnold for a while
playing with his mood ring application. We sat
there with our PowerBooks and the spontaneous network
created by Rendezvous and were able to start a small Jini
Djinn. We sat there and just played with his hack for a while.
That was a blast.

I also ran into a fellow I had worked with 20 years
ago. His company is now looking to get started with
Jini to solve some hard problems they've got in their
next generation of systems. I won't name drop here,
but perhaps he'll be back at the next Community
Meeting speaking on their successes.

The meeting's attendance of about 100 developers
was the right number. It was intimate yet there
were enough people there you probably didn't
know that you could have the opportunity to meet
somebody new and learn some new stuff.

Here are the last few observations:

Installer and deployment helpersThere was a great deal of interest in finding
better ways of deploying Jini-based services
into production. Note that this is a big change
from previous years where the questions and
concerns were more along the lines of finding
ways of climbing the learning curve. People
aren't just playing with the technology; they're
deploying it.

Transaction managers are in active useIt isn't always clear to us in the Jini group
which pieces of the Starter Kit are being used
and which ones are not. Specifically, I'd been
wondering if anybody was actually using Mahalo,
or Mercury, or Norm, and it was clear from the
discussions that all this stuff (and more) is
getting exercised. That's great!

Licensing issuesThere is a small groundswell of interest in
the SCCL now that everybody wants to deploy
and repackage this stuff. If folks were
struggling with the technology or had no
interest in deploying it, there certainly
wouldn't be any interest in details of the
license. I'm looking at this in a very positive
way.

A desire to have better access to the sourceThere was some rumbling in the group about getting
the Jini source tree out of the Cathedral in Sun
and more into the Bazaar, perhaps even in a
CVS tree on Jini.org. I think this shows a general
maturity of the community which cannot be understated.

So ends the Seventh Jini Community Meeting. It was
my first meeting (for some reason I'd been busy or
traveling for the others). I hope to see everyone
again at the next one!

> Thanks for the great updates. I only wish I was there!> > Any reasons why Sun won't put Jini's source up on CVS for> all? Sun doesn't seem to be marketing it at all, or> really have much interest in it. Just curious.

Maybe you can help with the licensing discussion by stating why you haven't just clicked through the signup on jini.org to acknowledge the SCSL and happily used it? What are the objections to the SCSL that make you unhappy or unable to deal with the current state of affairs?